The present invention relates to a method for producing ethylene or, more particularly, to a microbiological method for producing ethylene in a high efficiency.
Needless to say, ethylene is one of the most important base materials in the petrochemical industry and produced and consumed in large quantities, mainly, as a starting material of various kinds of synthetic resins including polyethylene as the most typical one. Ethylene is produced in the chemical industry almost exclusively from petrified underground resources such as natural gas and petroleum while exhaustion of such resources is a very serious issue due to the limited amounts of their underground deposits as estimated.
Accordingly, it is an urgent problem to develop a new source for the production of ethylene and one of the promising ways in this regard is to utilize microorganisms capable of producing ethylene in high productivity.
It is of course known that certain microorganisms can produce ethylene although utilization of a microbiological process for the production of ethylene has been far from practicability due to the scantiness of the amount of ethylene produced. It has been reported that ethylene is produced by Pseudomonas solanacearum as a species of pathogenic bacteria of plants. Further, Goto, et al. have reported recently in Plant Cell Physiology, volume 26, No. 1, pages 141 to 150 (1985) that ethylene can be produced in considerably high productivity by a species of microorganism Pseudomonas syringae pv. phaseolicola which is isolated from morbid punctation of kudzu vine. The productivity of ethylene, however, is still too low by this pseudomonad microorganism to be utilized industrially.